Apologies are often hard – that’s the point. An apology is due when trust is broken, and to restore trust the apology must be hard. This column discusses a model of apologies as costly signals with some recent experimental evidence.

Lab and field experiments help us understand human behaviour as they increase our confidence in causal effects in regard to different economic problems. This column highlights the relevance of experimental data and discusses the value of lab in comparison to field experiments. While lab experiments are the only applicable way-to-go in a number of situations, they tend to inflate scrutiny. This could artificially modify behaviour, and would potentially threaten the causal interpretation of the estimates. The debate about lab versus field experiments is far from settled. However, what economists do agree about is that to obtain convincing causal effects relating to human behaviour, a joint consideration of a number of methods would be superior to using any single one in isolation.